From epic poetry to game shows, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, humans have the most complex cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this culture ...

Discover the latest news, features and articles about the origin of the human species and what makes us different from our ...

For millennia, evolution has intrigued many great thinkers, prompting questions about how new traits emerge as species adapt over time. Then, attention shifted to natural selection and the inheritance ...

Researchers Gregory Goldman, Gregory Fournier, and Betul Kacar have identified a rare class of ancient gene families, called ...

The evolution of new genes is not the only way for a species to change. The loss of genes may also lead to adaptations that help species survive, but this idea has not been well studied. Now, ...

Findings suggest that new genes can form by repurposing fragments of ancestral genes while incorporating entirely new coding regions (the protein-coding parts of the DNA). This innovative concept ...

Tree genome evolution is a fascinating area in the study of biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Trees, with their distinctive life history traits, such as ...

For a long time, evolutionary biologists have thought that the genetic mutations that drive the evolution of genes and proteins are largely neutral: they're neither good nor bad, but just ordinary ...

A study shows how a single gene in Atlantic salmon can dramatically influence the timing of puberty -- a key factor for salmon life cycle and survival. A study carried out at the University of ...